| Organic chemistry is often viewed as one of the most difficult chemistry courses undergraduate students in a variety of majors will face. Even one of the greatest organic chemists, Emil Fischer, despaired of mastering the subject as a student. While there are a number of reasons that organic chemistry is such a difficult course and there have been a number of efforts to remedy the low success rates of organic chemistry students, organic chemistry students' chemistry misconceptions, a factor that could have considerable impact on student achievement, have not yet been examined to any large extent.;A variety of methods were used to study undergraduate organic chemistry students' chemistry conceptions of Bronsted-Lowry acid/base chemistry and related organic chemistry concepts. The results of an exploratory study with 23 organic chemistry educators about what they believe are the fundamental concepts in organic chemistry, general chemistry concepts they need to review while teaching organic chemistry, the misconceptions they observe in students, organic chemistry topics that students find difficult, and which concepts they feel affect later learning in chemistry were used to inform this research study. A number of chemistry misconceptions were noted by the educators; however, not all of the participants were necessarily aware of or seeking out misconceptions in their students. Additionally, while there is some overlap with the participants' views and the topical guidelines set forth by the ACS, the differences between each participants' perspectives on what is fundamental to organic chemistry are more striking than the similarities. Also, to establish the importance of Bronsted-Lowry acid/base chemistry in organic chemistry a popular organic chemistry textbook was examined page-by-page, resulting in 1/4 of the pages containing: direct discussion of Bronsted-Lowry acid/base chemistry, Bronsted-Lowry acid/base chemistry used to explain reactivity, or Bronsted-Lowry acids/bases as reactants and/or catalysts. Finally, undergraduate organic chemistry students' answers to a general chemistry concept test, to semi-structured interview questions on acid/base chemistry and related organic chemistry concepts, and to a multiple-choice, two-tiered test on these concepts were examined. Phenomenographic analysis showed that many of the volunteer student participants in second-semester organic chemistry courses at each of three very different institutions held misconceptions about ions/salts in solution, neutralization reactions, acidity trends, nucleophilicity in substitution reactions, and often lacked chemical reasoning for the chemistry concept questions they were able to answer correctly. |
